More than three weeks into the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on 2 October, Iran finally condemned the murder as an ‘organised’ and ‘heinous’ crime. ‘No one would imagine that in today’s world and a new century, we would witness such an organised murder,’ Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told a cabinet meeting on 24 October, adding: ‘I don’t think a country would dare commit such a crime without the protection of America.’

Why was the public condemnation so belated? It came only after Saudi Arabia and Bahrain — Iran’s regional nemeses — added the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and senior members of its Quds Force, including General Qasem Soleimani, to their terrorism lists on 23 October.

In contrast to January 2016, when the execution of prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr by Saudi authorities elicited a harsh backlash from Iran — which ultimately culminated in the (still) continuing severance of diplomatic ties between the two regional powerhouses — Tehran’s official reaction to the Khashoggi murder was measured and muted.

Unlike Nimr, Jamal Khashoggi was no friend of the Islamic Republic and its policies in the Middle East. He was particularly critical of Iran’s bloody ‘sectarian’ campaign in Syria. In his words, published anonymously in February 2016 (and disclosed only posthumously), ‘Iran looks at the region, particularly Syria, from a sectarian angle. The militias Tehran is relying on, some of which come from as far as Afghanistan, are sectarian. They raid Syrian villages with sectarian slogans, bringing to life conflicts from over a thousand years ago. With blood and sectarianism, Iran is redrawing the map of the region.’

Even so, Khashoggi’s lack of sympathy for the Iranian government wasn’t the main reason for its muted response to a political scandal of international proportions surrounding its regional arch-rival.

Squeezed by growing international pressure over its ‘destabilising’ activities and concerned about the impact of US sanctions against its oil industry and banking system, Rouhani’s ‘moderate’ administration was in fact hoping to use the Khashoggi case to mend fences with Saudi Arabia. Since the halt in bilateral relations in January 2016, Tehran has tried through explicit overtures and back-channel attempts to restore a working level of amity with Riyadh, only to be nixed, repeatedly, by the Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman.

The Islamic Republic is accustomed to being treated as an outcast by western powers, particularly the United States and its regional allies, but the absence of diplomatic ties over the past three years has arguably hit Iran harder than Saudi Arabia. On one hand, it has left Tehran with little leverage to persuade its partners at the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to refrain from boosting oil production at a time when reinstated US nuclear sanctions will considerably reduce its crude exports, thus damaging the Iranian economy. On the other, it has driven Saudis and their Sunni Arab allies, such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, closer to Israel, Iran’s arch-foe, in a fashion never seen before.

The abortive ‘wait and hope’ approach was not, however, the only stance Tehran adopted towards the scandalous murder of Khashoggi. Along parallel lines, Iran also pursued an unusually open and vociferous media campaign on the issue, letting independent and state-run outlets cover the story with full detail and great hype, in Persian, Arabic and English.

The purpose of this mostly unofficial media onslaught was twofold: alerting the domestic audiences to the bare reality that brutal suppression of dissent does not happen at home only, but is also perpetrated and condoned by those who regularly take Iran to task over systematic violations of human rights; and reassuring the regional constituencies that the Islamic Republic, as opposed to Saudi Arabia, is indeed the true champion of freedom and justice in the Muslim world.

Yet, the unusual freedom deliberately afforded the press on the Khashoggi case did not prevent exposing the state’s hypocrisy. It reminded many Iranians home and abroad of the ‘chain murders’ of 1990s, when dozens of writers and intellectuals critical of the Islamic Republic were brutally murdered by members of the security apparatus and intelligence services. Later, on 11 July 2003, 55-year-old Iranian-Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi died in custody, only 18 days after her arrest, and reportedly under torture, while those responsible for her death were never held to account. And most recently, Iran’s judiciary announced the suspicious death in jail of the Iranian-Canadian political sociologist and environmental activist, Kavous Seyed-Emami, attributing it to ‘suicide’. Kavous was my teacher and thesis supervisor at the University of Tehran in 2009-10 and anything but suicidal. Around two months before his fatal imprisonment, he informed me he was planning to stay in Canada for while on sabbatical, and suggested that we meet either there or in Sweden.

Lastly, at the same time as circumstances surrounding Khashoggi’s premeditated killing were being unearthed, yet another intellectual and human rights activist lost his life in Iran in suspicious circumstances. Farshid Hakki was reportedly stabbed to death near his house in Tehran and his body then burned. Shortly after the news of his death broke out on social media, on 22 October, Tehran’s police authorities claimed that he had committed suicide by self-immolation. Not unlike its Saudi rival, the Islamic Republic has a long history of trying to cover up state-sanctioned attempts to physically eliminate its critics, too.

The curious case of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder has undoubtedly served to demonstrate the brutality of the Saudi state under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. But it has also laid bare the systematic hypocrisy at the heart of the Iranian regime, and more broadly, the priority given by most state actors to strategic interests, rather than fundamental values.

Maysam Behravesh

Maysam Behravesh is a multimedia journalist at the TV channel Iran International who writes for Al Jazeera and Reuters, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Lund University in Sweden. Follow him on Twitter: @behmash